Last week, a British tribunal ruled on the case of doctor who told his boss, in the midst of a conversation about how to interact with transsexual patients, that he would refuse to address “any six-foot-tall bearded man” as “madam.” The doctor was then told that, if so, he would have to leave his position, which he did. But, writes, Dan Hitchens, the most disturbing part of the story is the text of the legal decision against the doctor:

Much of the tribunal’s judgment is barely readable, . . . but it puts its central point clearly enough: a “lack of belief in transgenderism” is “incompatible with human dignity and”—yes—”conflicts with the fundamental rights of others.”

Dr. Mackereth’s bosses might easily have sought a compromise: for instance, people who identify as trans could be passed on to a different doctor. Unfortunately—the tribunal judgment tells us—such a policy might have caused “offense or the potential for offense.” Just imagine! . . . The doctor . . . argued at the employment tribunal that he had suffered discrimination, prompting [the tribunal] to rule that, if you don’t think a man can become a woman—as rather a lot of us don’t—then your view is “incompatible with human dignity.”

First, if this judgment is correct, then presumably anyone can be forced out of a public-sector job on the off chance that he might, at some unspecified point, “offend” some unspecified trans person. Second, the judgment’s expansive wording tells everyone who doesn’t buy [into current orthodoxies] that their views—not even their actions—are against “human dignity.”

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.